Harlen signed for a package delivered by a corrupt postal worker late on a Wednesday night. His signature came with a clean, unwrinkled $100 bill—a tip for the trouble, which he handed over while wearing a grim, unreadable face. The package was a bag; the bag was long and flat, three feet wide. It was delivered to Harlen’s back-alley unlabeled shop, an address officially registered to “Standard Animation Incorporated,” but to the locals and black-market dealers, it was well known as the Death Shop.

Inside the bag was a corpse. The corpse, while alive, had been named Duncan. He had been quite attractive, and still was, despite dying quite recently in the ongoing storm. Electrocution, it was, by a severed telephone wire. It happens. Harlen, placing the bag—with some trouble—on the dented and stained operating table on the second floor of his workshop, lamented that the rain had stopped, leaving just the howling wind. This was no weather to bring people back to life in—Harlen unzipped the bag, and found Duncan smiling comically back at him.

Hah. Died instantly when electricity stopped your heart. You must’ve been shocked. Harlen removed the bag and flipped Duncan onto his back, then started cutting away his clothes. Looks like you’re not doing too well current-ly. Harlen grinned to himself as he finished removing Duncan’s clothes. He grabbed his trusty medical instrument—a meat knife—and rested its tip on Duncan’s spine, just below the T3 vertebra. He had done this a hundred times before, but in this moment he paused. Watt are you waiting for? he asked himself. He snorted. It was rare he had this much fun with a corpse, but Duncan had been a close friend. And watt a dumb way to die, it was!

But this was the important part of the procedure; it was time to focus. Harlen began the long process of removing Duncan’s bones, one by one, and replacing them with 3D-printed plastic copies. Once he finished a couple of hours later, he connected them with fishing wire to mimic tendons and muscles and all that weird biology stuff. Duncan’s body, “plastically substituted,” was now stronger and more durable than a normal human. And, to top it off, Harlen replaced the organic matter in Duncan’s skull with a low-power computer optimized for running artificial intelligence.

What Harlen did at Standard Animation, Inc. was strictly illegal. In the United States, there are very few things one can legally do to dispose of a dead body: the laws allow only for cremation, burial, burial at sea, remains scattering, organ donation, or cryogenic preservation. But technology moved faster than the octogenarians in government, and the black market business of eternal life paid too well, and—well, to be honest, Harlen needed a job. There was never a shortage of dead rich people.

Duncan stepped out into the sun. To his right, over the hills, he saw a rainbow. He smiled with his eyes closed and breathed in, letting the world press down on his cheeks, which he now touched. He let his fingers walk his face from chin to forehead, in so sensual a way that, if repeatable, he’d make a perfect prostitute. The sun felt good on his skin, and he savored it as though it was his first time feeling it. He stretched. In this dirty alley, he was a cat waking from a nap; the Sun greeted him; he had no care in the world. There was nothing for him to do, no job to go to. He was dead.

He was dead, and was this heaven? His life flashed before his eyes—all of his memories had been extracted from his organic hippocampus and uploaded to the biocomputer now running in his head, and his thinking was a hundred times faster than it had ever been. His life couldn’t do anything but flash through his mind. He stretched again.

“You done?” asked Harlen from behind.

“Jeez. God forbid I enjoy the moment,” said Duncan.

“You’ve had your moment. You don’t even need a moment, you’re a robot now. Get out the gate and let me work.”

“Work? You’re gonna go upstairs and drink alcohol. Alone.”

“At least I didn’t get fried in the back.”

“Yet. You know, I bet it’s cheap vodka, not anything good.”

“You’re pissing me off,” said Harlen. “Get out of my sight—and I mean this in the best possible way, but I hope I never see you again.”

“Not even my beautiful face?”

“Dumb robot,” said an exasperated Harlen.

“Eighty-nine times sixty-four is five thousand six hundred and ninety six,” said Duncan, looking back over his shoulder. He winked. Then he walked calmly and mechanically out the chain-link gate and onto the street full of boarded-up shops and scattered trash. Neon graffiti decorated the boards, covering the street in a community-made mural. As Duncan, finally understanding why Harlen chose this place, was about to start walking down the street, Harlen called out: “Wait, Duncan!”

Duncan turned around.

“Have a nice life,” said Harlen, “and don’t forget my money.”

Duncan smiled. “You’ll get your money, fat man. But I’m going to see Lucia first,” he said.

“What are you gonna tell her?”

“I’ll think about it on the way. Maybe I got wasted at a bar and had to crash at my friend’s house, maybe a robber stole my phone and I spent all night in a police station trying to get it back. Who knows?”

“Two nights.”

“Oh. So I lie a bit, then. She’ll still love me, I’m sure.”

“You wouldn’t tell the truth?”

“Hey Lucia, long time no see! How you doing? What? No way, really? That’s awesome! Oh, me? Yeah… I died, but then I got brought back to life. Well I’m still me, it’s my memories and all, and my brain is AI that thinks like I do… Well, yeah, it’s not really a brain, but it’s a computer modeled off of my brain. Like, yeah it’s still me, but technically not me… Wanna go on a date?”

Harlen was quiet. Duncan continued, his voice slower and gentle: “No Harlen, I won’t tell her the truth. You know how they treat people like me in the streets.”

“People like you,” Harlen repeated.

“Right. Robots, synthetics, hybrids, whatever you want to call it, like me. Not very welcome. I’d do better telling her I spent the last two nights hooking up with eight prostitutes.”

“Gay or straight ones?” asked Harlen.

“What?” asked Duncan.

“Well, if they’re gay it’s fine, she’ll be a little sad, but it’s fine. If they’re straight, though, that means there are girls better than her. That’s inexcusable, and I’d probably see you in my shop two days from now when she covers everything you own in anthrax. She’d probably mix it into your toothpaste.”

“Yeah, probably. Whatever, old man. I’m out of here,” said Duncan as he started walking down the abandoned street, his boots crunching the plastic littered in the street, arranged in a mindless scattered fashion as if to redact parts of illegible spray-painted messages on the ground. Duncan liked the trash.

“Get me my money!” called Harlen after him—but Duncan gave no reply, and money was far down on his list of worries.

“Oh my god!” screamed Lucia. “You’re alive!” she added as she ran into Duncan’s arms. “I thought you were dead, where the hell were you?”

“Oh, the boys and I hired like eight prostitutes, we partied for two days straight.”

“Straight?” asked Lucia menacingly.

“You know I’m kidding, calm down, bro. Look, I’m alive, I’m not dead in a ditch, I’ll tell you all about it later,” said Duncan. “Hey—do you have any food or something? I’m starving after the walk back.”

“You walked back? From where?”

“I mean, yeah. I didn’t have my phone so I couldn’t get a car or call you.”

“Aww, I’m sorry, baby. Where from?” she asked with a voice of genuine concern. She asked from behind the island in the kitchen, from under the polished marble countertop and from halfway inside a cupboard from which she now emerged holding a green and heavily used cutting board.

“The mall in Eastside. Could you add cucumbers to whatever you’re making please?”

“Of course, sweetheart. Isn’t that far?” asked Lucia. She started cutting peppers with impressive speed, and Duncan worried about her fingers. He liked them.

“It’s, like, 46 kilometers, I think,” replied Duncan.

“Wow…” mused Lucia. “Wait, I don’t know if that’s a lot,” she laughed. “What’s that in miles?”

“I think it’s 28.6?” replied Duncan.

“How’d you calculate that so fast?” asked Lucia.

“I don’t know, I guess I guessed.”

“Lucky guess. Was it hot?”

“Not really. It was 23 degrees Celsius, I think,” replied Duncan. He didn’t remember seeing the temperature anywhere, so his response caught him off-guard.

“In Fahrenheit?”

“73.4.”

“Oh, that’s not too bad. If you want this food to be ready faster, could you knead the dough? I’m not strong enough for it,” said Lucia, and Duncan happily obliged. His stomach growled while he worked, but after a minute of squeezing the dough over and over again, he noticed he wasn’t getting tired. Lucia was done cutting cucumbers and moved on to carrots—she seemed suspicious of him—Duncan felt a stab of fear, what if she…

He started breathing heavily, as though the fatigue was starting to seize him. A minute more, and he took a rest. He looked up.

“Hey, Lucia.”

“Mm?” she said without looking up from the carrots.

“I’m sorry for disappearing for two days.”

She smiled. “Make it up to me?”

He kissed her, and she did a little happy dance as she scraped the carrots into a bowl and moved on to cutting onions. Duncan smiled—she was pretty cool. And very attractive. It was while lost in these thoughts that Duncan forgot to act tired, and the dough was well-kneaded with no signs of exertion from him when Lucia stopped cutting the vegetables to look at Duncan.

“Be honest,” she said while putting the knife down, “because before you disappeared you couldn’t convert kilometers to meters—”

“Those are hard!” exclaimed Duncan, but as his mouth formed the words he realized they were false.

Lucia didn’t stop, “—so be honest. Did you die?”

Duncan looked down, embarrassed and afraid. “Yeah. I’m sorry. I should’ve told you. I got electrocuted by a telephone cable. I’m dead—you remember Harlen? He came over on New Year’s—Harlen fixed me up. I’ll find the money to pay him, don’t worry, babe. I’m still me.”

“I’m just happy you’re alive,” said Lucia. She picked up the knife and went back to cutting the onions, and when she smiled no tears rolled down her cheek.